> If you know of a reply to this version, I'd like
>to see it.

The simple answer is that you're overstating the case. Humans have no more "universal desire for the Infinite" than they do a universal desire for Pop-Tarts (TM) brand toaster pastries.

The desire is for explanations, and for self-preservation. Gods are created to explain why lighting happens, why the river floods, why the sun rises, and perhaps most importantly to the only known animal that is able to contemplate its own mortality, what happens to us when we die. I don't believe we have an inborn desire for an all-powerful creator. We simple have a desire for things not to be random, because we're not good at randomness. We *are* good at pattern recognition and cause/effect logic, so rather than saying "the lightning strikes randomly" we say "Zeus is angry, and tosses his lighting bolts at those who anger him."

Science eventually helped us to answer most of the issues we used to turn to gods for answers to, with the major notable exception of what happens to us when we die. This is why today, no major religion deals with questions like "why do the rains come at the same time every year" and instead deal mainly with our mortality. It's the one question we'll almost certainly never answer scientifically, at least to the satisfaction of most people (saying "our brains shut down and we cease to exist" is explanation enough for some.) Since nobody can absolutely prove consciousness can't somehow survive the body, it will always be open for religious interpretations.

And this desire for an explanation of what happens to us when we die is tied to the most fundamental of all desires for any successful organism on the planet, the desire for self-preservation. Without such a desire or instinct, an organism would fairly soon cease to exist, so natural selection has long since weeded out any such organisms. But again, humans, being the only known animals capable of contemplating their own mortality, are the only ones able to see the inevitability of death. The knowledge that we will eventually die is something every human eventually must contemplate, and that knowledge is unacceptable to us on a biological basis, since every one of us has a pre-programmed desire for continued existence (again, if we didn't, natural selection would have weeded us out long ago.)

So instead, we choose to believe we wont die. We create belief systems that allow us to think that we will somehow live on. They're sometimes coupled with moral and ethical systems that may require us to do certain things or live a certain way in order to live on, or at least live on happily. But to me, anyway, the bottom line is that our desire for self-preservation leads us to choose to believe we wont have to die. It's a fairly natural reaction to being both a species that can see the inevitability of death, and a successful species that has an innate desire *not* to die.

-- Dave